GameShark

Game enhancer which fails in my opinion to live up to its claims of enhancing games. The only real use I see in it is to cheat at games, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

After all, who are you cheating against? Yourself only, unless you're sneaky with your siblings. The game shark (made by Interact Accessories, a Recoton corp.) has different interfaces for various console machines, but the idea remains the same: The unit features a flash EEPROM or something similar which acts as a data bank for saved cheat codes. Cheat codes will affix a value to a certain memory address (this is where pointers come in handy) so as to give you an unlimited (or with some know-how, limited) supply of that asset. For example, you could play Metal Gear Solid with unlimited health so you never die.

The problems with the Game Shark (and its predecessor, made by Galoob "Game Genie") I perceive are quite simple:

Since the game is made very easy, it becomes a chore instead of a challenge. The game isn't fun if it's nothing but repetition of the same old thing with a different backdrop.

It costs usually about $50.

It will (AFAIK) invalidate your warranty for Nintendo and Sony Playstation units, and probably for any games you play with it. Last time I checked, Sega was ok with the idea of cheating.

You can hack your own codes via a simple interface, but since your codes are not "tested" and "approved," you run the risk of corrupting your database. I once had that happen, about eight months ago (around April 2000). I still haven't had the problem fixed. And you know what? I think games are better without the shark.

Gameshark was the name of a line of cheating devices for various game consoles, manufactured by Interact. It was similar to the Game Genie, a cheating device for older systems that changed the game by patching.

There were versions for a multitude of systems, including the Game Boyanditslittlebrothers, Playstations 1 and 2, Saturn, Dreamcast, and the Nintendo 64, which was both lauded for unlocking the massive amounts of hidden content in most of its games and reviled for its poor construction and buggy software.

For the cartridge-based systems, they plugged in the game slot and provided a slot for the game. When the console was turned on, it would boot to a menu where you could enable the codes, which could be activated with a switch once in the game. The cheats would let you get things like infinite lives, infinite ammo, secret characters, even let you open hidden menus. The codes themselves were in hex, and were basically instructions to change values (like 1 to 99). Because of the simplicity behind those kinds of codes, a few versions would let you make your own by searching the game's memory for choice values. To combat this, some games started using Dynamic Memory Allocation, which produced disposable codes that worked once, if at all. In response, better codes were made.